Lewis Hamilton is F1’s supreme, and perhaps only, show in town | Giles Richards | Sport

Two years into their tenure as the owners of Formula One and Liberty Media have known only one champion. With Lewis Hamilton taking the title in four of the last five years Liberty have inherited a period of singular supremacy by the British driver. Ordinarily this might be cause for concern as they seek to expand the sport but right now they must be positively relieved that if there is to be a dominant star, it is Hamilton.

For the last two seasons Hamilton has been pushed hard by Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel but has come out on top. Liberty want to see close, competitive racing with a range of winners but as things stand – a two-horse race between Hamilton and Vettel – they will not be concerned that it is Hamilton who is on top.

Before the US Grand Prix it was Hamilton who did a Q&A at the Nasdaq stock exchange. It was a giant image of the kid from Stevenage who had made it big which was then projected on the building in Times Square. The next day he appeared on Good Morning America.

It was only the latest in a series of high-profile appearances after he launched a clothing line with Tommy Hilfiger alongside models Winnie Harlow and Hailey Baldwin in Shanghai, Tokyo and New York.

Hamilton is hugely interested in music and in June collaborated with Christina Aguilera on a single under the pseudonym XNDA, a poorly guarded secret that was soon out. Gossip columns and news outlets were frothing when he and musician Nicki Minaj posted pictures of one another together in Dubai on their Instagram feeds. Hamilton has 7.9m followers, Minaj has 94.1m. After the race in Mexico he was congratulated by the actor Will Smith over the radio. A message he repeated on his Instagram feed. Smith has 24.2m followers. These are numbers Liberty will like.

It is publicity money cannot buy and stands in stark contrast to his contemporaries. Vettel has no presence on social media. He keeps his private life largely private “I am happy to do things that people think are boring but for me they are not,” he said this year. Within the sport Vettel is an interesting, at times fascinating character, but he may as well be invisible to a wider audience.

Behind Vettel stand only Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo as characters who project but rarely outside the F1 bubble, their footprint is negligible compared with Hamilton’s. Worse still, the future holds a number of young drivers who have had all their interesting traits excised with extensive media training.

Hamilton may be divisive but he is always fascinating, presenting the big picture Liberty want their sport to embrace, as former driver John Watson observed. “What Lewis is doing is something we have never seen before from a motor racing personality,” he said. “Many people find it uncomfortable. As far as I am concerned he is opening a different world, a different market to his sport and trying to draw in people from entirely different backgrounds, education, colours, creeds, whatever, to look.”